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Tag Archives: Ultraviolet (UK TV series 1998)

Transfer (Transferts, French TV series 2017) and Counterpart (USA TV series 2017)

Transferts (Transfer): this French TV series is brilliant.

Identity, mind-body, religion, politics, love, loyalty, corruption, bioscience, the future. French philosophy. And one very creepy – but strangely endearing – ‘little girl’ with a gun.

Am I entertained? Ooh yeah.

Alexis Loret and Arieh Wortholter in Transferts

In the not so distant future, kind family man Florian wakes from a 5-year coma to find his consciousness has been transferred into the muscly body of special forces cop Sylvain – illegally.

While Florian’s consciousness slept, consciousness transfer technology has been medically developed “for therapeutic purposes,” to enable individuals with terminal illness or incapacitating disability to transfer their beings into the bodies of donors on life-support. The technology is frighteningly simple – some gel goop, some basic equipment – and perhaps inevitably, a black market has emerged, where individuals are choosing to transfer into other bodies for reasons narcissistic, frivolous and criminal, and black marketeers are none too scrupulous about how those other bodies are sourced.

Within two years the technology is outlawed, not least due to pressure from the Catholic Church and its French offshoot, a C21st technology-led mega-cult led by the politically ambitious Père Luc. “Transfers”, people who have undergone the procedure, must present themselves to the authorities to be branded and confined for life in a medical facility with amenities some compare to a holiday resort.

The transfer process has been banned not simply on ethical grounds but because some ‘transfers’ experience reversion – an unstable and potentially dangerous state where their consciousness starts to split and psychosis occurs.

‘Transfers’ who do not hand themselves in are hunted down by a paramilitary squad called the BATI. Florian’s misfortune (among several) is that Sylvain, his host body, was/is a brutal “hero” of the BATI. Woops.

Meanwhile, a sociopathic rogue transfer has commandeered the body of a small girl, and has a malevolent interest in Florian/Sylvain. Sometimes it might be easier to simply, um, die.

Transferts has been compared, frequently, to the Netflix series Altered States, which I’m given to understand is overtly futuristic and heavy on special effects and technological references. Transferts is not like that.

Instead, it’s concerned with the implications of consciousness transfer for human relationships, personal relationships. If my spouse changes body, will I still have sexual chemistry with that person? If another consciousness commandeers my child, can I love that entity? Within my sphere of intimate relationships, what is my hierarchy of priorities, in terms of who matters most to me, in extremis? (The philosophical dilemma of the rescuer with the boat.) If I change physicality radically, into a wholly different body, do I remain me?

If I no longer remain who I was, what am I? Am I a threat?

Pili Groyne in Transferts

In fact the previous TV series Transferts reminds me of most is the UK series Ultraviolet (1998), memorable for introducing me to the work of actors Idris Elba, Stephen Moyer and Jack Davenport, but even more notable for rescuing the vampire genre from George Hamilton and ‘Love At First Bite’ and making soul-suckers really REALLY terrifying again. As they have remained since.

Ultraviolet had only the most basic special effects. Its impact relied on that ice in the soul the viewer experienced witnessing human and inhuman betrayals. Transferts has hardly any special effects; but it has that vampiric ice. Set in a city that in most respects seems like any contemporary European city, in Transferts it’s only occasional moments – ‘conferencing’ by hologram, the transfer technology – that remind us this is a future.

Like Ultraviolet, it touches on current, contemporary issues that raise ethical debate. In Ultraviolet, these issues included child abuse under cover of the Church, church-state collaboration, the status of ‘the Human’ and the status of the Other, and sustainability. In Transferts, issues raised include relations between State, Church and cult (again), the ‘rights’ and integrity (or otherwise) of the human mind-body-spirit, and also gender identity, and life extension technologies.

I’ve watched the six episodes of Tranferts Season 1. Now I’m hoping, hard, a Season 2 will be announced.

Not quite as OMG as Transfer but still intriguing: Counterpart, featuring a virtuoso turn – or virtuoso turns – by J.K. Simmons, a swarmy Harry Lloyd, and the bitterly beautiful Olivia Williams, a 50 y.o. actress willing to play ageing but devastating.

Sci-fi meets Cold War meets noir.

In Counterpart, Howard (J.K. Simmons) is shocked to learn the workplace where he’s held a low-level desk-bound paper-shuffler’s job for 30 years is a portal to a parallel world, a world which split from Our Side in 1997.

Harry Lloyd and J.K. Simmons in Counterpart

For the first five years the two worlds developed along closely similar lines. Then, a pandemic hit the Other Side, killing millions. The Other Side believes Our Side developed and released the pandemic deliberately, to destroy them. Secret diplomatic relations uneasily contain the parallel stasis, but extremists have no patience with diplomacy and the balance is about to be seriously unsettled.

The entertaining conceit of Counterpart is that for each of us alive on Our Side, there is, or was, a counterpart on their side. Until Howard meets his counterpart, no counterparts have ever – officially – met. But what happens if counterparts substitute for their Other? What happens when counterparts collide?

This is another series with some interesting philosophical questions at its heart about identity. It’s played for entertainment, and thank god for that, but yeah: it’s smarter than the average Other Worlds.